Licenses

As a company with a Large Account Reseller (LAR) status, Betacom is qualified to cater for customers in the scope of supplying them with licenses within the group agreements scheme. Betacom S.A. has the rights to sell licenses within following schemes: Select, Select Plus, Enterprise Agreement, Enterprise Agreement Subscription, Enrollment for Core Infrastructure (ECI) or Enrollment for Application Platform (EAP).

•The Standard Edition provides the basic functions of the OLTP and/or DW server, as well as reporting and analysis services.

These three main editions are offered in a consistent, tiered model which creates greater consistency across edition features and licensing. Enterprise Edition includes all product features available in SQL Server 2014, and the Business Intelligence (BI) Edition includes premium BI features in addition to Standard Edition database features.

The summary of information concerning given editions of SQL Server 2014 and their distribution channels is given in the following tables cited after Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Licensing Guide.

License modes

SQL Server 2014 is licensed in two modes:

•In the Server+CAL mode, SQL Server and all its users must possess a relevant license. This mode allows for licensing Business Intelligence and Standard editions, while helping to reduce the initial cost of license purchase.

•The Core-based mode requires purchasing a license for the logic processors of the computer on which the SQL Server 2014 or any given service (such as Reporting Services) of this server is running. The Enterprise and Standard editions may be licensed in this mode.

Server+CAL Mode

This mode requires the purchase of:

1. A license for SQL Server 2014. The license enables the running of any number of instances of SQL Server or its components within the environment of the same operating system, whether physical or virtual.

2. A CAL license for each device (Device CAL) and/or for each user (User Cal) of SQL Server 2014 or of any of its components.

Core-based mode

In this mode the number of SQL Server 2014 users is unlimited. This refers both to the number of users, as well as the number of devices on which client programs are installed. The Core-based mode is the only one available where the number of customers directly or indirectly connecting with SQL Server 2014 is difficult to determine.

To calculate the required number of Per Core licenses:

•Count the logical processors of the computer on which SQL Server 2014 is installed

•Multiply the established number by the parameter for a given processor type. For single-core processors the parameter equals 4, for dual-core processors it equals 2, for hexa-core AMD processors of the 31, 41, 42, 41 and 62 series, the parameter equals 0.75. For the remaining processors the parameter value is 1.

SQL Server 2014 Licensing Change

There are two important changes in SQL Server licensing:

•Prior to SQL Server 2014 log shipping, mirroring, and even failover clustering allowed for an unlicensed passive node, provided that the passive node didn’t become the primary for more than 28 days. That is no longer the case. Now to have a standby node you need software assurance (SA).

•To license a physical server, you have to license all of the cores.

If you have any question regarding SQL Server licensing, fell free to ask us.